Xorg packaging

[Lubos Lunak]

On čt 29. března 2007, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Kai-Uwe Behrmann wrote:
> > Xorg is supposed to be one project? A "rpm -qa | grep xorg | wc -l" gives
> > me 46. Really.  Ok, including devel packages.
>
> And how many do you see for the GNOME or KDE projects?

$ rpm -qa | grep xorg | wc -l
46
$ rpm -qa | grep kde | wc -l
45

 You loose :). And there's one even more interesting:

$ rpm -qa | grep xorg | grep lib | wc -l
34
$ rpm -qa | grep kde | grep lib | wc -l
5

 But this is not necessarily only about packaging. Despite the usual belief 
that shared libraries don't cost anything they do. Every single shared 
library regardless of its size more or less linearly increases symbol lookup 
scope (that won't be much done about as long as upstream glibc refuses things 
like -Bdirect), increases unshared memory usage (that can be probably only 
shrugged off) and causes more I/O at the application startup. Even if I try 
to be more fair and use ldd to count libraries, the average KDE applications 
links about as much X libraries as KDE libraries and the feature set is 
incomparable. GNOME uses more GNOME libraries and funnily enough that causes 
them some linker-related performance problems as well even though they use C 
and not C++.

 What I especially don't get is why there are all those 10k libX*.so libraries 
like libXdamage.so that all could be simply included in libXext. They're so 
awfully small that this is IMHO modularization taken a bit too far and I fail 
to see any advantage in this that'd be worth all the overhead.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
--------------------------------------------------------------
SUSE LINUX, s.r.o.   e-mail: l.lunak at suse.cz , l.lunak at kde.org